Steam reforming of liquid hydrocarbon fuels with online solid oxide fuel cell test

Although steam reforming of liquid fuels is a viable and effective way to produce H₂ for fuel cells due to their high-density and wide-availability, it is critical to develop an effective and sulfur/carbon resistant catalyst because higher hydrocarbons can cause coke formation and the organic sulfur in fuels leads to sulfur poisoning of the catalysts. In this paper, we report the development of Ni-based catalyst for steam reforming of liquid fuels, mainly commercial diesel. It has shown that a proper additive is important to promote the catalytic performance of Ni catalyst for steam reforming of liquid fuels. The addition of Co may cause higher carbon and sulfur deposit, while the addition of Fe could improve the carbon and sulfur resistance of Ni catalyst. Further addition of K to Ni-Fe catalyst can significantly reduce carbon deposit, probably due to its facilitating carbon gasification. In addition, we have evaluated the performance of SOFC using the reformate directly from steam reforming of diesel fuel over the Ni-Fe-K/Al catalyst at 800 °C and found that the diesel reformate performs reasonably well compared to hydrogen and has a stable electric power generation for over 100 hrs. The diesel reformate showed an open circuit potential (970 mV) greater than that of hydrogen (910 mV) and the maximum powder density with diesel reformate as a fuel was 1.41 mW cm^-2, while it was 1.81 mW cm^-2 with hydrogen.